Dear blog

I miss you. I feel very bad about not writing for two(!) months and leaving you hanging with a post about a friendly old man at a urinal. I’m usually much more of a gentleman.

I promise there’s no one else! You’re the only blog for me.

It’s just that I’m undergoing major life changes right now and my brain space is 100% packed with stress and red dynamite. And I’m not out of it yet — it’s going to be a crazy next few months.

But I wanted to swing by and give you a kiss, to tell you that I’ll try not to be away this long again. Because I’m still crazy about you.

And I have lots to tell you when I can find the words.

How’s it hanging, young fellow?

I got chatted up by an old man at the men’s urinal today — you know, about how he regretted saying goodbye to that fine cup of coffee he drank an hour ago, how much he wasn’t looking forward to the traffic on the drive home, how it sure was a beautiful day today, although a bit windy, etc.

I’m typically not a urinal chatter — men are disgusting creatures and I’m ready to get the hell out of there as soon as possible — but he was pleasant enough and didn’t appear to be a weirdo or pervert looking to employ a wide stance, so I indulged him.

That’s when I realized the brilliance of his technique — what a great way for a lonely old man to get a little social interaction! A guy in midstream can’t exactly politely duck away when he strikes up a conversation, and it would be just plain awkward to ignore him when you know you’re going to be standing there for another 30 seconds or so.

Bingo! Guaranteed pleasant social interaction.

I’m so remembering this when I’m a lonely old man.

I learned a new term today.

Jolly-up a cop: technique used by a cute girl to make an otherwise stern and humorless police officer smile and be happy with the ultimate goal of getting out of a traffic ticket: I can usually jolly-up a cop, but today it didn’t work.

My brother’s puny birthday package.

For most of our adult lives, my brother and I have exchanged bawdy birthday cards for our respective birthdays. Kind of juvenile, sure, but we get a kick out of trying to top the previous year’s crudity and sharing deep belly laughs over the vulgar silliness of the cards. Boys will be boys.

For my brother’s birthday this year, I sent him a card describing celebrity pet-names for their cocks, illustrated by a bunch of cartoon cocks drawn in various styles (and lengths) with their pet-names written underneath. Examples: Donald & The Apprentice (including comb-over pubes); Captain Jack & The Long Dong Silver; George & The Bushwhacker; Samuel L. & The One-Eyed Trouser Snake; Mel & Mad Max; Jean-Luc Picard & No. 1; and my personal favorite, Tom & Mission Impossible 2½. You get the idea. Of course inside the card I wrote a couple of helpful pet-name suggestions for my brother containing words like “small” and “tiny.”

I sent his birthday package to his work address so he wouldn’t have to go to the post office to pick it up. Not having room at his desk to open it, he took the package to his office break room where a female coworker was taking her lunch break.

He carefully pulled the card out of the envelope, and when he saw lots of cartoon cocks, he shoved it right back in the envelope. Then he sat down at a chair directly across from her and pulled the card out of the envelope again at an angle so she could only see the back of the card, and he the front.

What he didn’t realize, until he felt the piercing stare of his coworker, was that there were cartoon cocks all over the card’s back side as well.

A touching Valentine’s Day tale.

I was speaking to a coworker about a project requiring him to travel to a client site later this week. I asked him if leaving Thursday morning and spending Valentine’s Day away from home would be an issue (he’s been married for 28 years). He looked at me blankly for a few seconds, and then bent over and put his hands on his knees and started laughing uncontrollably.

Five best and worst Super Bowl ads.

Five Best:

Doritos - Mousetrap: A beautifully conceived blend of art-house film and Jackass episode. The best kind of cinema can wordlessly tell a story in just a few seconds, and this ad made it look easy. This got the biggest laughs at our party, perhaps because the payoff was so completely unexpected and absurd. May be a one-off and never quite as entertaining as the first viewing, but who cares? Perfectly tailored towards the warped sense of humor of men without pandering to the lowest common denominator (i.e., Bud Light). Brilliant.

Pepsi Stuff - Justin Timberlake: Hilariously taps into the male wish fulfillment of average Joe Blows everywhere who are secretly jealous as hell of JT’s hit records, sexy boyish charms, silky-smooth media-friendly personality, billions of bucks in the bank, and superfine starlet hanging off his arm. Cracking him repeatedly in the nuts may have been a bit unimaginative, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. But the smaller moments, like the cross-dresser and girl soccer player diving and snatching JT’s shoe and hoisting it triumphantly in the air like a trophy, took the humor to the next level.

Coca Cola - Parade Floats: A classic battle of old school (Underdog) vs. new school (Stewie Griffin) set to a soundtrack of classical music. A simple, understated concept that kept its momentum by cutting between interesting POVs of the mano-a-mano — I especially liked the shots from inside the high-rises — culminated with a brilliant ending of perpetual loser (and old, old school icon) Charlie Brown finally coming out on top at something. I’m sure most of sentiment-phobic America choked on it, but I found it to be a completely awesome conclusion, although I couldn’t help but wonder if Charles Schultz would have ever approved such a happy ending for ol’ CB had he not been six feet under in Santa Rosa.

Audi - R8: What can I say? I love a good homage to a classic film. The Godfather may be a safe and easily accessible choice, but I thought it was classy and well-done with enough element of surprise that it didn’t telegraph the homage or ruin it with cheap humor. But the sleek-lined R8 was easily the star of the commercial: Wow, what a beautiful piece of machinery! I’m sure it left every male heart racing with lust, perhaps even giving Victoria Secret’s Adriana Lima a run for her money.

Amp Energy - Amp Yourself: Is a dancing fat guy with battery cables clipped to his smoldering man-boobs funny? Why yes it is! Clearly owing a big debt to Chris Farley’s classic SNL Chippendales audition sketch and unapologetic in its lowbrow kinkiness, it worked for the same reasons Farley’s sketch worked: the fat guy can dance, and does so with crisp, non-ironic ass-shaking precision! That it immediately followed Adriana Lima’s Victoria’s Secret ad made it that much more of a riot.

Five Worst:

GoDaddy.com - Danica Patrick: It made me sad to see racecar driver Danica Patrick reduced to nothing more than a piece of jerk-off material. Really, has the Maxim-ization of popular culture finally made such a blatantly lurid “go to our homepage and see Danica Patrick unzip her top!” sales tactic acceptable? How truly pathetic and disgusting. I hear the payoff on GD’s web site is Patrick holding a stuffed beaver or something. SERIOUSLY.

Bud Light - Semi-Pro: Let me get this straight: A movie character for a movie that hasn’t even come out yet selling beer?? The marginalization of cinema continues — Will Ferrell should be utterly ashamed of himself, as should anyone else connected to this movie that had anything to do with this ad. The rest of the evening’s Bud Light ads were just as awful. I’m truly embarrassed for my sex that some men apparently find these ads funny.

Sobe - Thriller: I’m utterly baffled by the appeal of geckos as an advertising tool, and having animated geckos dance with a hot girl in a short skirt to “Thriller” doesn’t even begin to clear up that mystery.

Dell XPS - Red: I honestly thought this was a Levi’s commercial.

Gatorade - Dog Water Dish: Blech! Did Gatorade really want to associate dog slobber with their product?

The chicken-fried life.

I recently worked on-site for a week at the city hall of a major US city. I toiled away in a cubicle in a windowless basement two floors below grade, lost in a maze of worn utilitarian corridors not entirely unlike the facility Hannibal Lecter was housed in in The Silence of the Lambs. But I to adapt to my working environments like a chameleon, so I imagined myself as a mild-mannered bureaucrat who had no problem thriving without sunlight or good coffee.

I was on my own for lunch, but lacking a sexy bureaucrat girlfriend at home to pack my lunch, I asked my client for a recommendation. He suggested the cafeteria on the top floor. “Great food!” he said. Skeptical I was, but great food I definitely like.

I rode a slow, creaky elevator up nine floors with other city workers on their lunch break, who clued me in that chicken-fried steak was the special of the day.

I stepped out of the elevator to the commingled smells of a deep fryer mixed with notes of lunch meat and simmering canned vegetables. A display plate of the special-of-the-day sat on a small table by the front glass door, a large chicken-fried steak drowned in tan peppered cream gravy with sides of mashed potatoes, canned corn, and a large dinner roll. A small handwritten placard sat next to it that read “$5.29.”

I stepped up to the counter and ordered the special-of-the-day without equivocation. This set off a flurry of activity, the first of which entailed the cook reaching into a tan paper freezer bag the size of a bag of Purina and pulling out a frozen disc that he flipped into the gurgling deep fryer, which already housed baskets of fries, okra and onion rings. He pulled my fully-cooked chicken-fried steak out a few minutes later.

Did I want cream gravy on my mashed potatoes? Why, yes I did, thank you! And lots of butter pats for my dinner roll, please!

The cook handed me my steaming plate of food, which I gently placed on my fiberglass tray along with a spread of plastic utensils and white paper napkins. I grabbed a pint of milk from a tub of ice and stepped up to the cashier to pay. Before she finished ringing me up, I nabbed a thick slice of spongy pound cake tightly wrapped in Saran Wrap — almost to the point of squishing it — from a small stack next to the register for dessert and added it to my bill.

The meal was no Threadgill’s, but it felt right. The cafeteria featured one of the best views from city hall, a view that framed the bustling metropolis through a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking an expansive plaza that seemed like a big concrete welcome mat to the skyscrapers and historic structures of downtown. It was a view that made any frozen deep-fried meal seem like a feast for a king on top of the world.

It’s hard to describe how I feel at moments like this, but I really treasure them, as insignificant as they may be. It’s almost like I’ve stepped into another life for a day to enjoy the good, the bad, and the mediocre, a life that will soon be in my rear view mirror never to be experienced again.

Bambi.

Some coworkers and I hit a happy hour after work the other night, and we ended up at a place where the bartender staff is young, female and attired in particularly skimpy uniforms. Indeed, the blond slinging my suds was … let’s just say buxom.

I learned a lot about Bambi as the night progressed through random chit-chat here and there as she poured. She’s a junior in college studying business but taking the spring semester off to “get her party on” and get it out of her system. She was the only one in her family out of four brothers and sisters not planning on going to law school; both her parents are attorneys. “My dad understands” — she confided — “he took a semester off too.”

It was her second day on the job. Her previous employer, a competing skimpy uniform joint, let her go after she sneezed into a customer’s beer by accident. “I apologized over and over, poured him another one, and they still fired me!”

She was on the grumpy side because her boyfriend of two months wouldn’t take her skydiving. He was also nagging her not to drink so much. “He keeps telling me to ’slow down,’ but I keep telling him, ‘you better hurry up!’” She also complained he was too happy all the time. “He’s never in a bad mood! He’s always smilin’! I almost smacked him this morning when I woke up and he was smilin’ at me!”

I know she’s a grease fire waiting to happen, but I couldn’t help but smile as she prattled on. Her bold unpretentiousness and audacious lack of filter was remarkably refreshing. I had forgotten what it’s like to be so unburdened — to just live in the here and now and wave everything else aside.

It would probably do us all a world of good to reconnect with our inner Bambi every once in a while.

Five silly things my cat does.

1. Drapes a front leg over his eyes while he’s sleeping to block out the light.
2. Lays on his back and scratches his face with his back leg.
3. Eats freshly-popped popcorn, but only when it falls on the floor while being popped. He just stares at it if you offer it out of the bowl.
4. Vigorously licks laundry baskets and plastic-wrapped magazines like Tootsie Pops.
5. Snores like a hound dog.

Bomb the system’s favorite albums of 2007.

• Battles - Mirrored
• Justice - †
• LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver
• Bonde do Rolê - With Lasers
• Ulrich Schnauss - Goodbye
• 16 Volt - FullBlackHabit
• Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
• Stars Of The Lid - And Their Refinement Of The Decline
• Silverchair - Young Modern
• Queens Of The Stone Age - Era Vulgaris

With apologies to: Biffy Clyro - Puzzle; Blonde Redhead - 23; Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity; Eluvium - Copia; The Fratellis - Costello Music; Guitar - Dealin With Signal And Noise; Liars - Liars; Little Dragon - Little Dragon; Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero; Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?; Radio Infinity - Radio Infinity; Rob Crow - Living Well; Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand; The Sea And Cake - Everybody; Simian Mobile Disco - Attack Decay Sustain Release; The Tuss - Rushup Edge; Waldteufel - Sanguis; White Williams - Smoke

Didn’t quite live up to high expectations: The New Pornographers - Challengers; Low - Drums And Guns; Pinback - Autumn Of The Seraphs; Les Savy Fav - Let’s Stay Friends; The Go! Team - Proof Of Youth; The Apples In Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder; Air - Pocket Symphony; Caribou - Andorra

Crushing disappointments: The Cult - Born Into This; The Chemical Brothers - We Are The Night; The Hives - The Black And White Album; Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob; The White Stripes - Icky Thump; Björk - Volta; PJ Harvey - White Chalk; Beastie Boys - The Mix-Up; VAST - April

Overrated: Panda Bear - Person Pitch; M.I.A. - Kala; Radiohead - In Rainbows; The Field - From Here We Go To Sublime; Feist - The Reminder; Amy Winehouse - Back To Black; The National - Boxer; Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

Underrated: The Shins - Wincing The Night Away; Kings Of Leon - Because Of The Times; Rush - Snakes & Arrows; Type O Negative - Dead Again

Please shoot me: Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist; Linkin Park - Minutes To Midnight; Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace; Serj Tankian - Elect The Dead; Bruce Springsteen - Magic; John Mellencamp - Freedom’s Road

Favorite metal albums of 2007: The Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works; Baroness - Red Album; Torche - In Return; Neurosis - Given To The Rising; High On Fire - Death Is This Communion; Dethklok - The Dethalbum; Pelican - City of Echoes; Paradise Lost - In Requiem; The End - Elementary; Volbeat - Rock The Rebel/Metal The Devil